


Healing Touch

by foundCarcosa



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-13
Updated: 2012-06-13
Packaged: 2017-11-07 16:05:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/432971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fever comes in more than one form.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Healing Touch

He came every afternoon, without fail, just as the sun slanted lazy and golden through the almost-drawn curtains. The attendants would slip away, taking the basin of tepid water and the cloth with them, and Meredith would push herself up on the sagging pillows and glare off to one side until Orsino’s lanky shadow fell over her bedclothes.

It was a necessary thing, and a necessary thing only. He’d smooth her limp, bedraggled hair back from her forehead and turn the sheets down to just below her abdomen, his breath a cool lyrium-scented gust over her as he sighed and closed his eyes, his fingers twitching and hovering just over her — her nightshift would drift upward towards his static-emitting fingers before settling again under the pulsing glow of his magic. 

She’d bite back a sob of relief as the icy healing magic sank into her muscles and to the bone underneath, into her labouring heart and the compressed lungs. His hands would move slowly upwards, soothing inflamed nodes and aching vocal cords, shrinking stressed capillaries and throbbing veins, and finally seeping deep into her brain, where fever raged like a delirium wildfire.  
The relief the magic brought was temporary, a salve, a balm. The sickness would recede when it felt like it. This was just rest for the weary, and she took it without complaint.

Shivers overtook her when he was finished, the coldness overriding the lurid flush of the fever and dragging down her internal temperature. He’d bundle her up in the bedclothes then, and the attendants would return with hot broth and nips of red, red wine, and he’d slip away as if he’d never been there, and she’d forget about him until she woke up flushed and babbling the next day.

Fighting magic with magic. She hated him for needing him, for needing the bane of her existence to soothe its own damage.  
And yet, how she craved the touch of his hands.

He came in that afternoon like clockwork, and this time her clouded blue eyes were trained on the entranceway.

Orsino faltered, unsure, used to being ignored and rendered self-conscious and clumsy by this new scrutiny. “Is the illness abating?” he asked, lowly, and Meredith fixated on the barely-perceptible nervous twitch of a muscle just under his right ear.

“Touch me,” she rasped, voice painfully scratchy from lack of use but still forceful. He flinched back from her, eyes widening as if she’d asked him to stab her just under her left breast and twist.

Her hand shot out from under the bedclothes, quick as a serpent’s strike, and grabbed his wrist. The flesh ground painfully against bone as she jerked him closer, placing his hand over the swell of her breast and clamping her hand tight over it to keep it there.  
Under the sheets, her legs shifted restlessly.

“I’m burning.” Her eyes bore into his, and though Orsino did see a desperate sort of lust there, he also saw pain and mute hatred, and he was afraid.  
“Your magic did this. Fix it!”

He tried to pull his hand away, but the friction of his tugging only made her arch and hiss, and beneath his robes he thought he might be burning too. “Meredith, you’re preventing me from—”

“To the Fade with your stupid spells,” she spat, her legs scissoring in a violent effort to kick the covers off her completely. “When you leave, I only burn hotter. Fix it, mage. Fix me!”

The way she said ‘mage’ made his skin crawl and his balls shrivel, but she was clawing at him and snatching at the closures on his robes, and delirium made her _strong_ , stronger than he’d thought possible with such a wasting sickness, and somehow she’d pushed off the covers and pushed up her shift and his hand was disappearing beneath it and the fever he found there burned hotter than anything he’d ever felt and her thighs had clamped tight around his wrist so all he felt was fire, fire and the trembling of her body beneath him and the all-too-dangerous friction of robes against hardening flesh—

He was dizzy and gasping when she shoved him off her, nearly tumbling to the floor. His head throbbed, so insistently that he felt it all the way to his toes, and his fingers were bathed in a fragrant slickness and his cock was harder than raw lyrium and he thought he was waking from a sleep in which he’d dreamt too deeply.  
But Meredith was there when he pushed himself to his feet, her face turned away from him and her chest heaving, her bedclothes and shift tossed and wrinkled. The echoes of hastily-stifled groans still echoed in his ears, as his pulsing fingers still felt the pull of her core.

He didn’t think he’d have the strength or the will to proceed as normal, to marshal his energy and activate the healing spell, to ignore the fact that she’d stolen five minutes from him that he didn’t necessarily want back.  
When he left, eyes slightly glazed and mind too preoccupied to register the attendants’ farewells, he considered forgetting — considered chalking it up to the sickness and its delirium alone, never speaking of it again, never even giving indication that it’d happened at all.

But if she was burning, he was burning too, and no spell on earth would fix _him._


End file.
